Supervised or unsupervised & model types¶

Peer Herholz (he/him)
Postdoctoral researcher - NeuroDataScience lab at MNI/McGill, UNIQUE
Member - BIDS, ReproNim, Brainhack, Neuromod, OHBM SEA-SIG

@peerherholz

Aim(s) of this section¶

learn about the distinction between supervised & unsupervised machine learning
get to know the variety of potential models within each

Outline for this section¶

supervised vs. unsupervised learning
supervised learning examples
unsupervised learning examples

A brief recap & first overview¶

let’s bring back our rough analysis outline that we introduced in the previous section

so far we talked about how a Model (M) can be utilized to obtain information (output) from a certain input

the information requested can be manifold but roughly be situated on two broad levels:
- learning problem
  - supervised or unsupervised
- specific task type
  - predicting clinical measures, behavior, demographics, other properties
  - segmentation
  - discover hidden structures
  - etc.

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Learning problems - supervised vs. unsupervised¶

if we now also include task type we can basically describe things via a 2 x 2 design:

Our example dataset¶

Now that we’ve gone through a huge set of definitions and road maps, let’s go away from this rather abstract discussions to the “real deal”, i.e. seeing how these models behave in the wild. For this we’re going to sing the song “Hello example dataset my old friend, I came to apply machine learning to you again.”. Just to be sure: we will use the example dataset we briefly explored in the previous section again to showcase how the models we just talked about can be put into action, as well as how they change/affect the questions we can address and we have to interpret the results.

At first, we’re going to load our input data, i.e. X again:

import numpy as np

data = np.load('MAIN2019_BASC064_subsamp_features.npz')['a']
data.shape

(155, 2016)

just as a reminder: what we have in X here is a vectorized connectivity matrix containing 2016 features, which constitutes the correlation between brain region-specific time courses for each of 155 samples (participants)

as before, we can visualize our X to inspect it and maybe get a first idea if there might be something going on

import plotly.express as px
from IPython.core.display import display, HTML
from plotly.offline import init_notebook_mode, plot

fig = px.imshow(data, labels=dict(x="features", y="participants"), height=800, aspect='None')

fig.update(layout_coloraxis_showscale=False)
init_notebook_mode(connected=True)

#fig.show()

plot(fig, filename = 'input_data.html')
display(HTML('input_data.html'))

at this point we already need to decide on our learning problem:
- do we want to utilize the information we already have (labels) and thus conduct a supervised learning analysis to predict Y
- do we not want to utilize the information we already have and thus conduct an unsupervised learning analysis to e.g. find clusters or decompose

please note: we only do this for the sake of this workshop! Please never do this type of “Hm, maybe we do this or this, let’s see how it goes.” approach in your research. Always make sure you have a precise analyses plan that is informed by prior research and guided by the possibilities of your data. Otherwise you’ll just add to the ongoing reproducibility and credibility crisis, not accelerating but hindering scientific progress. (However, the other option is that you conduct exploratory analyses and just be honest about it, not acting as they are confirmatory.)

that being said: we’re going to basically test of all them (talking about “to not practise what one preaches”, eh?), again, solely for teaching reasons

we’re going to start with supervised learning, thus using the information we already have

Supervised learning¶

independent of the precise task type we want to run, we initially need to load the information, i.e. labels, available to us:

import pandas as pd
information = pd.read_csv('participants.csv')
information.head(n=5)

	participant_id	Age	AgeGroup	Child_Adult	Gender	Handedness
0	sub-pixar123	27.06	Adult	adult	F	R
1	sub-pixar124	33.44	Adult	adult	M	R
2	sub-pixar125	31.00	Adult	adult	M	R
3	sub-pixar126	19.00	Adult	adult	F	R
4	sub-pixar127	23.00	Adult	adult	F	R

as you can see, we have multiple variables, i.e. labels describing our participants, i.e. samples and almost each of them can be used to address a supervised learning problem (e.g. Child_Adult)

Supervised learning¶

goal: Learn parameters (or weights) of a model (M) that maps X to y

however, while some are categorical and thus could be employed within a classification analysis, some are continuous and thus would fit within a regression analysis (e.g. Age)

we’re going to check both

Supervised learning - classification¶

goal: Learn parameters (or weights) of a model (M) that maps X to y

in order to run a classification analysis, we need to obtain the correct categorical labels defining them as our Y

Y_cat = information['Child_Adult']
Y_cat.describe()

count       155
unique        2
top       child
freq        122
Name: Child_Adult, dtype: object

we can see that we have two unique expressions, but let’s plot the distribution just to be sure and maybe see something important/interesting:

fig = px.histogram(Y_cat, marginal='box', template='plotly_white')

fig.update_layout(showlegend=False)
init_notebook_mode(connected=True)

#fig.show()

plot(fig, filename = 'labels.html')
display(HTML('labels.html'))

that looked about right and we can continue with our analysis

to keep things easy, we will use the same pipeline we employed in the previous section, that is we will scale our input data, train a Support Vector Machine and test its predictive performance:

from sklearn.preprocessing import StandardScaler
from sklearn.svm import SVC
from sklearn.pipeline import make_pipeline
from sklearn.model_selection import train_test_split
from sklearn.metrics import accuracy_score

pipe = make_pipeline(
...     StandardScaler(),
...     SVC()
... )

A bit of information about Support Vector Machines:

non-probabilistic binary classifier

Pros

effective in high dimensional spaces
- Still effective in cases where number of dimensions is greater than the number of samples.
uses a subset of training points in the decision function (called support vectors), so it is also memory efficient.
versatile: different Kernel functions

Cons

if number of features is much greater than the number of samples: danger of over-fitting
- make sure to check kernel and regularization
SVMs do not directly provide probability estimates

before we can go further, we need to divide our input data X into training and test sets:

X_train, X_test, y_train, y_test = train_test_split(data, Y_cat, random_state=0)

and can already fit our analysis pipeline:

pipe.fit(X_train, y_train)

Pipeline(steps=[('standardscaler', StandardScaler()), ('svc', SVC())])

followed by testing the model’s predictive performance:

print('accuracy is %s with chance level being %s' %(accuracy_score(pipe.predict(X_test), y_test), 1/len(pd.unique(Y_cat))))

accuracy is 0.8974358974358975 with chance level being 0.5

(spoiler alert: can this be right?)

Supervised learning - regression¶

after seeing that we can obtain a super high accuracy using a classification approach, we’re hooked and want to check if we can get even higher scores via addressing our learning problem via a regression approach

for this to work, we need to change our labels, i.e. Y from a categorical to a continuous variable:

information.head(n=5)

	participant_id	Age	AgeGroup	Child_Adult	Gender	Handedness
0	sub-pixar123	27.06	Adult	adult	F	R
1	sub-pixar124	33.44	Adult	adult	M	R
2	sub-pixar125	31.00	Adult	adult	M	R
3	sub-pixar126	19.00	Adult	adult	F	R
4	sub-pixar127	23.00	Adult	adult	F	R

here Age seems like a good fit:

Y_con = information['Age']
Y_con.describe()

count    155.000000
mean      10.555189
std        8.071957
min        3.518138
25%        5.300000
50%        7.680000
75%       10.975000
max       39.000000
Name: Age, dtype: float64

however, we are of course going to plot it again (reminder: always check your data):

fig = px.histogram(Y_con, marginal='box', template='plotly_white')

fig.update_layout(showlegend=False)
init_notebook_mode(connected=True)

#fig.show()

plot(fig, filename = 'labels.html')
display(HTML('labels.html'))

the only thing we need to do to change our previous analysis pipeline a classification to a regression task is to adapt the estimator accordingly:

from sklearn.linear_model import LinearRegression

pipe = make_pipeline(
...     StandardScaler(),
...     LinearRegression()
... )

A bit of information about regression

modelling the relationship between a scalar response and one or more explanatory variables

Pros

simple implementation, efficient & fast
good performance in linear separable datasets
can address overfitting via regularization

Cons

prone to underfitting
outlier sensitivity
assumption of independence

ML/DL with a focus on Neuroscience - SynAGE workshop

Supervised or unsupervised & model types¶

Aim(s) of this section¶

Outline for this section¶

A brief recap & first overview¶

Learning problems - supervised vs. unsupervised¶

Our example dataset¶

Supervised learning¶

Supervised learning¶

Supervised learning - classification¶

Supervised learning - regression¶